bashsshtmuxio-redirectionbyobu

Recording whole terminal screen using tee


I am trying to get help from someone, so I want to record my screen to be able to later review what happened. Formerly, I have used ssh with tee like ssh user@server | tee recfile and the recording works fine. Even when I use byobu on the server, everything is recorded using that simple pipe.

But when I pipe byobu itself to tee, the file will contain pretty nothing. I have used both byobu | tee recfile and byobu |& tee recfile. In both cases, byobu starts and works well, but the record file will only contain a few lines not related to the things happened in byobu session.

And byobu uses tmux. I have tried to pipe tmux to tee as well, and the output file only contained [exited].

My question is how tmux writes to the screen? It seems that it does not use standard output or standard error, as if it did, tee could work recording the screen. Is there a way to tell tmux to write to the standard output or standard error? Or is there another way to redirect the output to tee?


Edit: I checked that screen | tee recfile and screen |& tee recfile will produce an empty file. Also, bash | tee recfile will only redirect the output of executed commands to the file (user@name:~$'s and the input commands are not in there). bash |& tee recfile will do likewise, except that the prompt of the bash (user@name:~$) is not displayed at all.


Solution

  • As gniourf_gniourf pointed out, script solved my problem.

    I also wrote a simple C++ code to playback the recorded file. Compile it with --std=c++11. (I use script -c byobu --timing=recfile.tim recfile to record and scriptout recfile recfile.tim 3 for playback.)

    https://gist.github.com/Shayan-To/672c77fbf9811d769d453c8a9b43747e